Across the Oxus KABUL-MOSCOW-VIENNA, 1956
THE CHEAPEST WAY to get back to Western Europe from Afghanistan in 1956, as I discovered after my unsuccessful attempt to conquer the Hindu Kush, was to fly Aeroflot. I therefore paid a visit to their Kabul offices, which at that time were located in a large, non-committal-looking private house fitted with several doors, none of which opened when I either rang bells or banged on them. After a long interval in which I could distinguish the voices of a man and a woman in what sounded like intimate conversation somewhere inside the building, one of the doors did open and I was led into the office of the manager, a Mr Scholkonogov, an assertive monoglot Russian in a bright blue suit, for whom one of his aides, a crop-haired gentleman, all smiles, interpreted.
I told Mr Scholkonogov that I wanted to fly to Venice.
‘Why?’ he asked.
It seemed a strange question for the manager of an airline to ask a potential passenger, but at this time I was unused to Russians.
‘Because my wife and children are in Venice,’ I said. It was no good complicating matters by telling him that they were, in fact, in a village between Trieste and Monfalcone.
‘Better you fly to Tirana,’ he said, with the air of someone who had already made up his mind that that was where I was going whether I wanted to or not.
‘But Tirana’s in Albania, it’s miles from Venice,’ I said. With a man like this unless I watched my step I would probably end up in Siberia. Happily this was not his intention. He was a nice man, trying to look after my interests. ‘Better you go to Tirana because Tirana is much cheaper fare; but if Tirana no good, go to Vienna. Vienna for you still very cheap.’
‘How cheap?’
‘Very cheap. You buy Afghanis [the Afghan currency] on the black market with English pounds at 150 Afghanis to the pound. Then you buy a ticket from me in roubles at a very good rate of exchange’ – I forget what it was – ‘and the entire journey Kabul – Vienna by Moscow will cost you …’ – at this point there was a halt in the conversation during which he got out an abacus and went to work on it, eventually coming up with a figure – ‘8650 Afghanis, £51. Good for 6000 kilometres. Why not go to England?’ – more work on the abacus – ‘That will cost you only 10,000 Afghanis, £8 more, and we will both come with you. We have always wished to see England.’
‘I can’t do that, I’ve got a wife and children waiting for me in Venice.’
‘Mr Scholkonogov asks me to tell you that wives and children are nothing but trouble,’ the interpreter said as I prepared to set off for the Bazaar right away, apprehensive that the black market in sterling might suddenly collapse. ‘He will telephone our Embassy and tell Mr Oleynik there that it is all right as far as we are concerned for a visa to be issued for you. You should have no difficulty, but go there at once before what Mr Scholkonogov says to Mr Oleynik is forgotten.’
The plane was an Ilyushin 12, a Russian version of a Dakota. The windows were fitted with lace curtains and the headrests with antimacassars, the only concessions to luxury in this otherwise austere machine. The effect was curious. All that was lacking was an aspidistra. It remained less than half full all the way to Moscow, in spite of people getting on and off, which would scarcely be the case today.
The stewardesses were monolithic. They gave us sweets with the air of schoolmistresses providing the most disagreeable of their pupils with some undreamed-of treat, but no sooner had we put them in our mouths and begun sucking them than we were told to put on our oxygen masks – there was no such thing as one of those mindless, preliminary demonstrations which all too often send the recipients of this vital information to sleep – so we had either to swallow them or spit them out.
Now we were off, on the crossing of the Hindu Kush. Sadly I looked down on snow-covered summits that I now knew, in my heart of hearts, I would never conquer. And then we had to put on our masks in earnest.
With the mountains behind us we were over the Oxus, seeing dense jungle, momentarily, and coming in to land at Termez, on its right bank, in Russian Uzbekistan, where we were out of sight of the river, which I longed to see, a magic one to all explorers.
From Termez we flew northwards to Tashkent, over the Zeravshan and Turkestan Ranges, and over Samarkand, all of which I identified using the Oxford University Economic Atlas of the USSR, which I had bought in the Bazaar at Kabul.
There, in a fearfully gloomy small hotel – who was I to complain where bed and board was part of the £51 ticket? – we dined interminably in the restaurant of the hotel. It took more than an hour for the first course to arrive from the time we sat down at our various tables. The other guests were mostly emancipated male Uzbeks – no Uzbek women were present – all of whom were dressed in Western clothes, although some of them still wore their characteristic, embroidered skull caps. They were more at ease in their suits than they were with the Western cutlery with which they had been provided. More happy, as I would have been, given gristly lumps of mutton to deal with, to have picked them up and tackled them by hand, instead they stuck their forks vertically into them with one hand, while they sawed away with their knives at an angle of forty-five degrees to the meat with the other, so that the effect of numbers of them doing this at once was like the string section of a large orchestra playing away out of tune, on miniature versions of the double bass or cello.
What was by now only relatively modern Tashkent had been built soon after the Trans-Caspian railway reached what was then the Tashkent Oasis in 1898. It was already in the process of being knocked down and replaced by even more gimcrack structures. Later it was to be flattened by an earthquake. Most of the old Uzbek houses in the parts I was able to visit had either been razed to the ground or were in the process of being demolished. Any Uzbeks who retained anything of their native garb, apart from the skull cap, were very old indeed. Walking about the city in this fashion, gazing more or less open-mouthed at everything, I was very soon taken into custody by two plain-clothed policemen, who demanded from me the piece of paper giving the name of my hotel and my room number and on receiving it speedily returned me to it.
Early the following morning we flew northwestwards, following the line of the Syr Darya river and the railway from Tashkent to Moscow, a line on which I had always longed to travel. To the east the milk-chocolate-coloured expanses of the Betpak-Dala Steppe, stamping ground of nomad hordes, stretched away in the direction of Lake Balkhash, four hundred miles or so to the east, while immediately below the river wriggled through what appeared to be desert like an endless, greyish green snake.
Then we landed at Dzhusaly, about a hundred miles east of the Aral Sea, on a military airfield out of sight of the river, out of sight of everything except an endless nothingness of steppe. A searing wind was blowing and the air was filled with the high-pitched screamings of Soviet jet fighters warming up for a practice sweep over those parts of Kazakhstan which today are some of the most secret and difficult-to-get-at areas of the USSR. Then we took off again, seeing the Aral Sea shimmering in the sun, on a short trip to Aralsk at its northern end, where we took on more fuel, after which we crossed the southern outliers of the Urals and were in Europe. At Uralsk we ran into a big electric storm and there the pilot altered course to fly north of what was the normal route, which would have taken us straight across the Volga to Penza, but still flying parallel to it. From now on, we flew very low over endless forest.
Twenty-five minutes after passing over Uralsk, on our new course, I looked down on what, if it was not the first missile site I had ever seen, was a very complex sewage farm, a series of dome-shaped concrete constructions, sprouting up in what looked like newly-made clearings in the forest, like freshly-emergent mushrooms,